Palenque: Jade Pearl in the Rainforest
This web edition introduces Rolf Becker’s richly illustrated book Palenque: Jade Pearl in the Rainforest in English. The study presents Palenque as a city of water, terraces, temples and dense forest, and follows the long story of its rediscovery through reports, plans, drawings, photographs and later research. The result is not only a historical narrative, but also a visual archive of how knowledge about Palenque was built across more than two centuries.
“The book is staged as an exhibit: essay, image archive and source book in one.”
This opening section now gives the chapter more visual depth and presents the project like a museum installation before the source plates begin.
Palenque in the Rainforest
The ruins lie in Chiapas, west of the Usumacinta, on artificial terraces at the foothills of the southern highlands. Becker describes the city as a place where architecture and tropical vegetation have always existed in tension: the forest repeatedly concealed the monuments, while water and topography made settlement, ritual life and urban development possible.
A City of Water and Stone
The book emphasizes the hydrological character of Palenque, or Lakamha’ — “the place of abundant water.” It points to the streams, aqueducts and carefully adapted terrain that shaped the city. Water management appears as one of the defining achievements of Palenque’s builders and one of the reasons for the city’s long importance within Maya history.
Rediscovery and Documentation
A central thread of the volume is the history of encounter: from early local knowledge and eighteenth-century Spanish reports to the work of Bernasconi, del Río, Armendariz, Dupaix, Castañeda, Waldeck, Stephens and Catherwood, and later investigators. Their drawings and descriptions became crucial records, especially because some architectural details and sculpted surfaces later deteriorated, were removed or disappeared beneath vegetation.
An Illustrated Research Archive
Because the source volume contains a large number of visual materials, the images below are arranged as a compact museum wall. Each thumbnail opens into a larger archival plate so that the illustrations and their printed captions can be read more clearly. Together they preserve the documentary richness of the original book while keeping the web layout elegant and readable.
This English presentation is an editorial web adaptation based on Rolf Becker’s German book “Palenque: Jade Pearl in the Rainforest” (2016). The full visual plates below reproduce the original illustrated source pages in order to preserve the historical images and their original printed captions, while the surrounding editorial text has been translated and adapted into English for this website.
